Language is an archaeological vehicle, full of the remnants of dead and living pasts, lost and buried civilizations and technologies. The language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.Russell Hoban (children’s writer, 1925-2011 – cf. Haffenden 1985: 138)

Introduction

Linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating) have made Australia an unlucky country. These twin forces have been in operation in Australia since the early colonial period, when efforts were made to prevent Aboriginal people from continuing to speak their language, in order to ‘civilize’ them. Anthony Forster, a nineteenth-century financier and politician, gave voice to a colonial linguicide ideology, which was typical of much of the attitude towards Australian languages (Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843, p. 2, cf. Scrimgeour 2007:…

Yesterday, my students did a practice essay test. They had to write, basically, one paragraph that made some sense and try, if you can please, to limit the grammar errors. The topic was, “what is your dream? How do you obtain your dreams?” It sounds a bit abstract for middle school students, but it was a topic from a chapter in the book. At the very least, they could have simply gone with what was in there.

I was pretty surprised by the results. I graded the essays first and I noticed that my 3rd graders are either at the high end or the very low end of language profiencency. A good ten or so students did very well on the essay, wrote 10-12 sentences that followed logically. Another fifteen students essentially wrote nothing at all or wrote in Korean. There was little middle ground.

Here’s one example, that was written solely in Korean:

“I don’t have a future hope yet. I don’t know what I want to do I don’t know what to say probably because I’m not good at writing English also I haven’t decided on my future dream yet. I think I should try to learn English more I cant write English essay in Korean anymore .. at least I will try to speak English .. I’m gonna study the last exam hard.”

It is a bit heart-breaking.

Note that this student started off the essay with “My”, but quickly crossed it out and wrote the above in Korean. The student is quiet, she sits in the back and doesn’t normally participate. But I often see her busily scribbling English words in a notebook, memorizing vocabulary, and studying for what I assume are the standardized tests. She’s doing what she believes she can.

Not what she can do, I am sure. — I give that anecdote to now tell this one:

Yesterday, I went to my first Korean language class. It is a small, informal group of friends that meets with one of our Korean friends who has a little more experience using Korean Inter-language. We have a textbook.

I showed up yesterday with the intention of being happy, upbeat, positive and extroverted. Those were my intentions. And they still are. I am a language teacher, I know how important intrinsic student motivation is to the learning process.

Within the first 10 minutes of the class, everyone introduced themselves to me and I fumbled through a couple of things I can half-assedly say. We are all friends here.

The teacher tells me that since I am new, haven’t had a chance to go over the book (got it the day before), it might best if I just watched for that day. I said ok.

Let me now describe my motivational state– I had done next to nothing yet and still I was:

Angry

frustrated

hurt

nervous

proud

fearful

unworthy

defensive

intimidated

embarrassed

despair

— (If you are reading this Sean, it’s not you! or the class! this is just me)–

Now, remember what I intended to feel. Positive, extroversion, happy.

I won’t qualify or explain any one of those emotions. I don’t know that I have the poetry of language to do so, nor the insight. I simply had the presence of mind to think, “what am I feeling, right now” and then record my thoughts.

– I thought about my 3rd graders and that little girl who sits in the back and scribbles word after word after word during my classes.

– Or the boy who talks to me everyday, or tries to, and yet never even lifted the paper to write an essay. Just put his head on the desk for 45 minutes.

I also thought about the boy whose English is so poor that I sincerely don’t understand hardly anything he ever says to me, who wrote some 10 or so sentences, with colorful word choice, in syntax that was completely opaque and incomprehensible. But you could see him trying.

And I just wonder, what is different about him and the girl in the back?

It’s that special time of year again for students here in Korea. Final exam time. And the bi-yearly festival of putting off your studies and instead cramming for standardized tests has been in full-force.

The students were given several worksheets to help them prepare, among them were a couple of vocabulary sheets. These sheets have between 25-30 words each and I was struck by one single idea.

The number of “Schwa [ə]” vowels was very high. Unsurprising, I know. Because of the way English uses stress, many vowels not in a stressed syllable (which historically were [a] or [o] or something else), have “reduced” to the schwa. As the joke goes—

A quick look at the Schwa

I decided to quantify just how many schwas are in the vocabulary for my students. And as it turns out, a huge portion of words my students learn, use a schwa. (complete vowel list at the end).

Out of 246 vowels (both monophthongs and diphthongs) 28% are the simple schwa. The next highest is the lax [I] (as in ‘tip’) at 17% and then the lax [ɛ] (as in ‘edge’) at 10%. (As an aside, the [I]/[i] tense/lax pair make up 26% of the vowels in the data. For the Korean student of English, this is also a difficult vowel pair to master as they are not contrastive vowels in Korean <they are allophones in Korean>).

If we take out the diphthongs (and why wouldn’t we?), the schwa jumps to 32% of all monophthong vowels. Almost a third. As a rule, diphthongs tend to be far more variable and less frequent. The most common diphthong in the data was [aɪ] at 7 tokens or 3% of the total. Monophthongs make up 86% of the vowels in the data.

It is sort of amazing to see that over 50% of all the monophthong vowels in the data are either a schwa or [I] (and 45% including the diphthongs).

Ok. Good. So we have established what everyone already knows, the schwa is really really common in English. Next, let’s look at the environments where Schwa occurs.

At university, I spent some time looking at vowels before liquids (and I spent more time looking at liquids in general for another project), and so it does not surprise me too much that over 50% of the schwas occur before a liquid segment. (Just think how common the ‘-er’ or ‘-al’ morphemes are). Liquid segments have caused quite a bit of change across languages (the Korean liquid ‘ㄹ’ is a great example as well). The schwa occurs before nasals at a very high rate as well, at 20%. Together, liquids and nasals account for 71% of the segments following schwas.

This leads us to another interesting point. That of the syllabic liquid. Liquids are so pushy that often they take an already reduced vowel, the schwa, and push them completely out. (Sometimes I tell my students to “eat” the vowel before an [r] or [l]). Using my own dialect, I found that I could erase about 40% of the schwas before liquids. Whereas, the schwas before nasals, I could only skip one or two (I believe there are dialects that can syllabify nasals more easily, though I don’t know.)

Which puts us in an interesting position. The schwa is by far the most common vowel in English, but, at least in my dialect, 28 of 69 (40%) of those schwas can be completely skipped in most situations (except, I suppose, for the most careful of speech). Of course, I am speaking from an American dialect (with that good ole, twang that the British like to talk about) and I suppose in other dialects, skipping schwas may not be so common.

All of this is interesting, for me. But the burning question that I want answered or discovered, is how can I use this information to give my students good linguistic tools for mastering, not just English, but language. My hypothesis is that if students can be taught the rules governing stress at a basic level, they will be able to better guess when to reduce a vowel or not.

Problems with teaching syllable stress and vowel reduction

The problem I can see with actually teaching the linguistic rules of syllable structure and prosody, is that the rules governing the syllable and stress in English are more like guidelines. I don’t know if teaching about syllable “feet” is possible at young ages. A quick look around the ESL internet shows that while many teachers know stress is very important, but the guides to teaching or learning it are very vague. For example, on the forum for Grammerly.com (not a great resource, in my opinion) one commenter says this,

“You must study phonetics. There are some rules about which syllable to stress. But…the rules are rather complicated! Probably the best way to learn is from experience. When you learn a new word, you should also learn its stress pattern. If you keep a vocabulary book, make a note to show which syllable is stressed. If you do not know, you can look in a dictionary.”

So, learn from experience. Ok.

I.S.P. Nation recognizes that syllable stress can be particularly problematic for Chinese (and Korean) speakers, whose languages are not stress-timed (like English) but instead are syllable-timed. From the literature he provides, no suggestions are made to use syllable-stress rules as a tool the students can use, though he does suggest explicitly telling students why it seems so hard for them (meaning, contrasting their L1 with English) and explicitly talking about not just the stressed syllable, but also the unstressed, meaning the schwa. (90-92).

The teaching tools suggested seem to place little focus on pronunciation in general. Nation makes it clear that it is important, but the list of activities is noticeably smaller and involves far more lecture than the activities he provides for listening/speaking. Essentially, the gesture movements you learned in elementary school (place your hand under your chin), tapping syllables and repetition activities are all that is offered (91).

I can’t help but feel Linguistics has more to offer the ESL educator and the ESL student in identifying not only stress patterns in English, but how and when to reduce vowels. Any further resources anyone has would be appreciated.